​Reports of looting and the torching of homes days after Baghdad announced it's 'victory' in Tikrit, suggests anything but liberation for city inhabitants.

Two question must be asked; exactly what liberation has been promised by Abadi, and what might the upturn of looting and public killings since April 2, reveal about the country's future fate?

To call these unfolding scenes of violence a retributive culture would wrongfully assume that those militia's are recasting as 'daesh' have committed a wrong - an imaginary which in fact bypasses the 'innocent until proven guilty' dictum.

The liberation Abadi announced two days ago appears to have translated for some as freedom to enact unthinkable crimes - some of which include public lynching of suspected, Islam State group fighters.

Equally shocking, are the disturbingly high levels looting has risen to, suggesting the country has slid back into a culture of revenge and sadism.

Reuters correspondents in the country reportedly witnessed a series of grotesque spectacles of death and near death - corpses dragged through streets as battlefield trophies, the looting of stores, and wide-scale vandalism.

Evidence of the scope of militia criminality in passing days has also been catalogued by Sunni Iraqis on platforms such as twitter.

Below are only some of the images being circulated, exposing a reality which stand in stark contact to government claims.